Fewer Words, More Feeling

Lemme tell ya a story.

Late in my young development - probably later than most - I began to realize that systems of deep-seated belief remained so only by tenuous virtue of masses of people remaining heavily and personally invested in their continuation.

This did not excuse me from explaining physical systems; planes do not fly because people believe they do, but it brought into question social machinery; organized patterns of behavior, starting fairly early, with reading.

I read as a child. I read now. I don't know why I do it, other than to learn that which would be painfully slow or unbearably laborious to learn in practice. History is a fantastic example of a lesson better learned by written analysis than by structured re-enactments.

And, I read for enjoyment; every Sherlock Holmes story, the Sprawl books by Gibson, a few by Stephenson, a few by Clavell. Catch-22. A bunch of others. They melt like wax now and combine and get on my fingers and it feels weird.

But something then - and now - ate at my brain as I ate at the books.

What if this isn't the best way to learn? To enjoy myself? To gain insight?

Part I: Don't Know Much About Science Book

As a young man in school, I knew that sitting on this fear would be the best thing to do. To attain any hope of scholastic success, not to mention respect from adults (whom I already knew were my only chance of gaining any influence over the course of my young life) I knew that demonstrating a lifelong fealty to reading was paramount.

I knew that to survive, I had to tow the party line and insist in lockstep with my peers that "books equal knowledge", that the publishing mechanisms that brought us bound and set type were the wellsprings of human evolution and greater good, and that the defense of every piece of printed material sanctified by a publishing mark was my overriding and irrefutable life directive.

Certainly the only option for a young man struggling through the public school system and trying to attract the attention of an erudite crowd was to be literate. After all, if you're not literate...you had might as well be illiterate.

It was stressed as well that readers had better capacities for abstract thought. The goal, of course, was to attain powers of imagination and visualization. I think. Nobody ever said outright that the goal was to try to get to the point that you could levitate stuff with your mind and get psychic powers, but you kind of got the idea that's what everyone else was hoping would happen if they read more than the kid across from them.

Even in my perusal of children's TV, the particular self-righteous tone of Baby Piggy from Muppet Babies is still vivid now as I recall her speaking proudly of her i-mag-i-na-ci-on before diving through the closet into another matted clip of French Dadaist pie fights.

And if I thought I was going to be safe discarding the standard talisman of scholastic achievement and stubbornly go my own way - learning minus the University system (shocking!) - I was wrong. Apparently, there is no autodidact in anyone's memory that has ever survived more than two seconds in open air without a book. They shrivel up or get a rash or something, I don't know.

I couldn't escape. One way or the other, I had to merit any successes I had to books. Reading them, writing them, lauding their authors, collecting them, comparing them, analyzing them, spending my life worshipping them. Words. On pages. Printed out, stuck together with glue, jammed between cardboard. Like it or not, this was to be my religion. I liked books. But this was a cult. And I wasn't a believer.

I went for years agonizing over which track would cause me less pain. College, or surviving on my own. I was in grave danger of spooling out the rest of my teenage probationary years without clinging to either liferaft: books, or severely overpriced books. Textbooks, I think they call those.

An Aside

I mention this because it's now over a decade later and I remain very skeptical that there is any God-planted flag in the ground that declares every victory in the war of human progress as belonging to the Nation of Books. I scrapped and climbed up to the current ladder rung I inhabit now watching system after system declare itself self-evident, much in the same way books do.

Every system had the same thing in common. A group of people, several million truckloads of resources, and a mountain of money, all sworn to protect a continuously paying investment.

But what kid ever figures that out? Back then, there was no fighting. There were no great epiphanies that tore open the shroud hiding the grand machine. There was only acquiescence if you wanted your freedom, A's if you wanted your allowance (or your Nintendo).

There was no reward, no personal profit in declaring a tautology a tautology, nothing behind the door of great discovery of the whirling cogs and escapements of the world's massive, silver-age clanking mechanica than another dismissal for being "young and passionate".

So.

Having not declared my allegiance to either the staunch collegiate or independently didactic track, there was despair in everyone's hearts as I took to my first few years of highschool unsure of myself or my future as a someone-who-has-to-start-thinking-about-paying-for-his-own-Nachos-Bell-Grande (hey, the concept was a lot more frightening back then).

But something was changing. Something about the way I was going to receive, send, and process what books were all about: information. A change in information was playing out that would lead to a new path for me and for people like me, stuck in the middle.

It began the first day I heard the crackle and shriek of a healthy modem reaching out to touch an open circuit, thousands of miles away.

Jesus. If only my mother knew the long distance phone bills she was about to receive.

To Be Continued...

The XNA Game Studio AI Challenge (or, The Art of Doing a Thing)

Think arrangement. Coordination. A Thing. You're with me, right?

Qu'est-ce que c'est? You're right – I'll explain.

Seats. Computers. Network cable. TVs. Signs. Hundreds of spectators. It wasn't that long ago that I looked at these elements in a disparate way – took the glue of the thing out, factored it right out – and saw instead a discrete point where I fit. Where the specific set of skills met a specific criterion for applying, it glowed, it said plug in. Beyond that, it was silent. No pushing beyond, no coordination to bigger, better things.

That worked for about two years, maybe three.

It started simple. I planned parties at my place. Made notes on the whiteboard about who was bringing the "lite" beer, the bratwursts, made question marks by the people that were tentative – I ended up with best-case worst-case counts and food arrangements for my own birthday party, because I wanted that kind of organization. No cracks, no places where people would run into a problem they couldn't solve and look around with that lost expression that just screams out that they're just not feelin' it.

I knew it then, I was talking about putting together a Thing. Let's step back and define this.

thing (ˈthiŋ): noun. a matter of concern what takes a certain size (t) of what-have-you, a length of time beyond x whenever, a given critical whatszit (y), and z wrangling of human beings to Make It Go.

Examples of a Thing: Shuttle launch, ladder badminton tournament, three-family Christmas, rock concert.

Examples of Not a Thing: Calling your masseuse, planting a flower (single), sending a Thanksgiving card, drawing a dragon (poorly).

So, sailing: that's a Thing. The instant I stepped into the O'Day 27 with the kitchenette you just didn't want to touch, backwards and missing instruments, smoky outboard engine, I knew something was going to happen with me. I imagined bigger boats, week-long treks, meals, and unforgettable evenings under the spell of sunsets. I spent money, I spent time, I passed tests, and before a year was out, I was hip-deep in self-made Visio charts, planning Bahamian cruises, San Juan adventures, and every single one of my one-hundred cruises since that day was officially a Thing.

And there was last year's GDC, and Europe, and all the workshops in between with their kickoffs and their checkpoints and their post-mortems, these, they were Things.

Today, it's a brand-new challenge, two months in the making, for this year's Game Developers Conference here in San Francisco. And I'm pleased to report that, once again, we're talking on the order of a Thing. The XNA Game Studio AI Challenge.

In Closure in Copenhagen, I alluded that it was the power of consensus that drove it home for me; XNA had earned its stripes by the gauntlet of the Community – through fire and flame, XNA had been stretched, torn apart, beat into every shape, rolled flat, and ultimately came out a winner – a genuine What People Want.

The XNA Game Studio AI Challenge was a push forward on that concept – what can we bring that leverages XNA that's got appeal – developer appeal, crowd appeal, something for everyone?

Without taking too much of your time, I'll tell you that they called me up on this one. Told me to go be a PM (Program Manager) on this for a while. Today was our first competition day at GDC, and it's been an amazing ride so far. Our first day we had hundreds of visitors, thirty-two competitors, and eight finalists with amazing AI bots that drove the crowd wild. And, we now have a full slate of competitors signed up for tomorrow – all remaining thirty-two spots are completely booked.

I figure I'm posting this as not only a plug for the continued success of XNA as a platform, but also as a personal touchstone as I realize that a PM's mantra – for me, anyway – really comes down to being the person that coordinates, administers, and seeks constant improvement, and their unit of currency – that atomic count of what they live and die by – is a Thing.

Can I put together a Thing? Can I Make it Go? While the jury's not in on the endgame – there's still all day tomorrow and the Finals tomorrow night – this Thing does indeed Go. And that makes me happy, it makes me confident, it makes me want to continue to reach higher, broader, bigger.

To all that made this first day spectacular – including our competitors and spectators – thank you! See you tomorrow!

2008 Game Developers Conference

All those in San Francisco this coming week for the Game Developers Conference, listen up:

Stop by Booth #738 in the career expo area on Wednesday, Feb 20th, or Thursday, Feb 21st during the day to participate in the XNA Game Studio AI Challenge!

This real-time coding competition is your chance to show off your coding skill and win some great prizes. I'll be there running the contest on both days, so stop in, sign up, and say hi!

You can also say hi at the ISM Poker Invitational on Tuesday. See you there!

My Life with Games: Introduction

Note: In light of the New Year, I was giving consideration toward a kind of retrospective, maybe a word or two about where I've been yielding to more recent exploits - something like the traditional Christmas letter.

I realized that there's more here.

Something about where I have been has recently been nagging at me; I am at a crossroads, and taking my life's work further means an exegesis of my past pivoted around a central point, in this case, games.

There are many stories to tell, all for different reasons, all contributing to the person I am now and what I can be in time.

I hope you enjoy these memories - this is the first in a set I hope to expand as the year plays out.

 

January 1990

I am nine years old.

It is cold, but very little of me – save the tops of my ears – seems to care. I am on a mission at the back of the playing field. I am in fourth grade, and in my hastily-assembled kit bag are the gadgets of high-tech spydom. A stocky, blocky semi-automatic pistol. A grenade. A basically-round thing that’s supposed to be a tracking device. Even a little listening device that goes in my ear.

The devices are all made out of construction paper. The gun is purple. The grenade is yellow. The bag is constructed from two sheets of paper stapled hastily together on the edges. This departure from reality matters little to me.

I have discovered Covert Action, a game developed by Sid Meier and released earlier in the year on those big floppy five-and-a-quarter discs. I am acting out the game. It is spying, surveillance, and sabotage, all for the good of the free world.

I am at that critical age that homogenization gives way to the diversity that will define subgroups in later years. We are giving way from being "just kids" to being kids in one group or another. This type of child, or that type of child. Readers, athletes, debaters, scholars, troublemakers.

I don't know what I'm becoming. I am aloof, almost deaf in a way. A year ago, I was running around the playground with my arms outstretched, channeling my innate desire to fly. The slipstream wind over my hands was almost enough for a breath of barely-discernible lift, and with that buoyancy, I fancied being sustained, weightless, forever.

At nine years old, I have a vague sense that, as a child of my age, that sort of behavior is unpopular, even touching the tangent of the symptomatic. My mother and father fight about money, about work, about time. I feel a desire to stay disconnected from their worldly problems, but I am losing the earliest comforts I had - I can no longer fly.

I turn toward video games, by no means a new pursuit, but one recently having gained some social prominence through the development of new VGA graphics, and so, for being there when the need arose, I settled into the simulations of the surreptitious, the underhanded, the camouflaged.

I would become a spy.

One student - Matthew - stays with my evolution. He watches me cut my functionless gadgets from multicolored paper. He listens as I outline plots against world targets, fed by descriptions of nefarious shadow organizations.

And, at his most devoted, Matthew faithfully tags along. Along to the playground, along to the playing fields. We imagine stalking targets in the sewers as we walk in the shadow of the bleachers. We climb fences and pretend to jump building rooftops in pursuit of shadowy masterminds.

Not one tracking device beeps. No grenades explode. I do not shoot any bullets from my gun, because it isn't real. We don’t know how to make guns that shoot. We are children.

But something sticks, something at the core of what we imagined we were. Maybe someone saw us. Maybe Matthew talked - certainly a punishable offense in the clandestine service - but word got around.

I know this, because it is January, 1990, and there sits atop my desk a rolled-up tube of red construction paper. I did not put it there. Matthew did not put it there, yet there it sits. It is adorned with the letters TNT - a child-sized stick of trinitrotoluene. Dynamite. Somebody had made pretend dynamite, for our pretend game.

Someone else wanted to play, too.

XNA European Tour 2007: Videos from Belgium and Finland Available

To those that didn't get a chance to attend the XNA Game Studio European Tour, never fear. Our partners around Europe are finalizing and uploading the recorded sessions so you can view them and learn all about XNA as if you were right there.

I'm proud to announce two such sessions are now available for you to view; the first comes from our partners in Belgium, the second from our partners in Finland.

Belgium

The Belgium sessions are available in Silverlight format only, and require a few clicks to subscribe to MSDN Chopsticks.

Democratization of Game Development - Dave Mitchell
Build a Game in 60 Minutes - Charles Cox
XNA 2.0 Deep Dive - Charles Cox
Future View and Call to Action - Luc Van de Velde
Benelux Game Initiative - Tommy Goffin

Finland

The Finland sessions are all available in non-Silverlight format, however: the coding sessions are available in a Silverlight-enhanced format that seperates out the code and the speaker (that's me). I highly recommend the Silverlight version.

Democratization of Game Development - Dave Mitchell
Making Games for a Living - Jyri 'Jay' Ranki
Build a Game in 60 Minutes - Charles Cox - Watch in Silverlight!
XNA 2.0 Deep Dive - Charles Cox - Watch in Silverlight!


Enjoy, and I'll be bringing you more as they arrive!

XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 - Photos Now Online

The collection of photos I and others took for the XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 is now available on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/agentcox/collections/72157603421195725/

Enjoy!

Europe, Day 8: Closure in Copenhagen

My mind’s reflection centers are rapidly closing down – the event is over. From its start in Dublin, Ireland, and now closing the last two days in Helsinki, Finland and Copenhagen, Denmark, the XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 has been an unprecedented success.

There are blogs and forum postings detailing community reactions in almost every venue. We are headed to Tivoli Gardens to celebrate this evening, and tomorrow morning at 10 AM I board a plane for London, and then for home.

It's not unlike me to get reflective at times like this.

Helsinki, Yesterday

We are standing on the steps of the cathedral. Helsinki is under a gray sky, a grainy colloid of old mixed with new. Gravel sprinkled everywhere melts the recent snowfall.

I am awake. After Dreamhack, it has been almost impossible to regain any strength to pull through, but I finally have what I need – fresh air, and the proximity of a culture that’s more than just the here, the now, the digital.

It was years ago, early on in my career in Microsoft that I began to realize that I could live only short sketches of life surrounded by the sterile triumvirate of glass, black, and chrome designs that signal the apogee of the modern age. For the first time in what felt like years, I stepped out among the trees and saw them not as resources, but as symbioses, variables in an equation owned not by us, but by the larger structure.

I realize the same feeling is upon me – and satisfied – on the steps of the Helsinki Cathedral. We are games, games are us, but it is more than we’re concerned with at the moment.

We work long hours. We suffer intolerable crunches. We are prone to shortsightedness. Too often, we make ourselves – or others – victims of our inability to see integration in everything we do; how what we create today may affect so many tomorrow.

The cathedral’s insides are handsome, sparse, functional. They bring with them not the unstructured sketches of early worship, or the gilded, dyed tones of later hierarchical religions, but a sense of form and scale. An engineer’s cathedral, perhaps.

Mathematics, logic – these things intersect the planes of belief and culture – perhaps no more visibly so than in games. As we look forward to a day of free expression in interactive form, for all, not just through the filters of top-down production, it is on my mind to understand that games have a point.

It’s not that they didn’t before. It’s just that more people are listening.

Helsinki-Vantaa Airport

The snow is blowing sideways. Deicing vehicles are spraying down the waiting aircraft, including our Avro jet to Copenhagen.

I remember the social atmosphere at the University of Helsinki. The scholastic home, of course, of Linus Torvalds – the driving force behind Linux. We, as Microsoft, were an orthogonal concept – the very definition of an enemy force, well behind their lines.

The students were open-minded. They did not jeer, they did not shout us down, they did not reject us. There have been so many ideas I have seen – and some that I have worked on – that have short-sighted goals in mind: goals of domination, offense, position-jockeying, gamesmanship. These, I feel, would have been called out and rejected, and rightly so. But I feel that what I am doing now represents a belief in something that transcends these short-sighted tactics and focuses on serving a new and emerging need that people genuinely want – if only in small baby steps.

XNA Game Studio was not for everyone. It was clear enough through this tour that not everyone wants to be a game developer, and in the group of those that do, not everyone wants to use XNA Game Studio. This is good, this is normal, this is healthy. This does not scream the needle’s far-right peg of quackery, nor does it seem a deflated and uninteresting concept when played in front of the European stage.

I can say then, that XNA is building and moving a resource that will become part of the larger ecosystem of games, and of the larger world we live, work, and play in. It is growing its own legs now, and the community is allowing it the space to continue to thrive.

For that, for the reception I have received in every country, in every venue, and for what that courtesy indicates – an acceptance of a product that is on the way toward passing the global metric for what we believe to be genuinely good for our future – I thank you; it reinforces that this product is worth working on, worth tweaking, worth restructuring as we learn more about the world around us, both digital and corporeal.

As one of the many messengers to bring the news and teach the platform: Ireland, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Denmark – thank you for everything.

Now let’s get to work and build some games!